


Worst Case Scenarios

by altschmerzes



Category: White Collar
Genre: Bedside Vigils, Father-Son Relationship, Found Family, Gen, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Major Character Injury, Season/Series 04, Team as Family, everybody is VERY worried, set between 4x15 and 4x16, this is not a james bennett positive fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:08:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22342354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altschmerzes/pseuds/altschmerzes
Summary: A hostage situation lands Neal in the hospital and Peter waiting for him to wake up. As he waits, kept company by the other people in their lives waiting for Neal to come back to them, he thinks about fear and family, and makes a phone call to James that doesn't go as planned.(for my found family bingo square, 'bedside vigils')
Relationships: Peter Burke & Neal Caffrey
Comments: 21
Kudos: 198
Collections: Found Family Bingo





	Worst Case Scenarios

**Author's Note:**

> this fic. is there a plot? no. is there much of a point? no. is there a lot of soft feelings and found family content? yes. is it indefensibly long for basically being plotless found family h/c? you bet. did it take me fully forty-five minutes to title it? also yes. 
> 
> for my found family bingo square 'bedside vigil'. enjoy, and drop me a line if you liked it!! <3

> _My mind was heavy, run ragged_
> 
> _With worst case scenarios_
> 
> _Emergency exits, and the distance below_
> 
> _\- Sleeping at Last, "Atlas: Six"_

There are some sounds you never forget once you’ve heard them. One of those is the sound a gun makes as it strikes across the back of someone’s head - a hollow, sick thunk that ends any other sound that came before it. It plays on a loop through Peter’s mind, a series of moments one after the other, disjointed and choppy, until that final sound cuts it all off, and it starts over again. 

The three seconds of surveillance footage from the corner store that caught Neal being grabbed and yanked back into a blue van. The blue van, empty and abandoned, cut tracking anklet blinking alarmed and red in the gloom. The phone call with the drawling sneer on the other end, promising Neal dies if Peter doesn’t show to the meet. The moment Neal’s voice interrupted his captor, shouting at Peter, _Don’t do it, don’t come, it’s a tr-_

The gun, hitting Neal in the back of the head. A hollow, sick thunk. Silence. 

It loops and loops, over and over on itself, until the moment the car screeches to a halt at the location for the meet. The docks are deserted except for another van, a muted burgundy color, and a couple of men in dark clothing skulking around with their very posture screaming crime. Peter barely spares them a glance as they approach - he’s only looking for one thing, and he can’t find it. He can’t see Neal.

Time moves strangely in moments like these, moments when a case reaches its peak and a live wire is loosed in a room full of dry hay. It’s either stomped out too quick to pose much of a threat, or it catches, and everything goes up in an instant. Today is one of the second sort, and it goes to hell so fast Peter actually misses it when it happens. Gunfire trades between parties, voices shouting, in his earpiece and all around him, and he still can’t find Neal. 

It takes only seconds for the explosive clash of law and violence to come to an echoing end, though it feels like hours. It’s then that a new set of moments replace the first, a new set of fractured clips to loop endlessly, this time as Peter sits in the waiting room of a hospital. He stares at the wall across from him, some pale peachy-beige color he’s beginning to hate, and relives it. Over and over. 

The last shot of the firefight, Diana’s. The metallic cinch of handcuffs around a pinned suspect, three or four feet to Peter’s right. The moment he finally sees Neal and it all started going so much faster. Spreading red stain on a white shirt, shocked blue eyes, the sound he made when he hit the water. 

He hadn’t seen it happen. Peter can’t seem to get past that, staring blankly at that nondescript wall and twisting his fingers together, hands wringing. Somewhere, in the midst of all that, Neal was shot, and he’d missed it. What he hadn’t missed was Neal going into the river, the deadweight in his arms when Peter followed him in and dragged him back out again.

Paramedics had been on the scene in less than two minutes, already called because of the shootout. By the time Peter had managed to get them both out of the water there were strange hands reaching down, pulling Neal away from him, shepherding him away before his cold-shocked lungs could get enough air to say anything. They’d wrapped him in some odd foil emergency blanket and bundled him into a separate ambulance, and it had taken an hour and a half to convince the ER doctors he was suffering from nothing more than first stage hypothermia. 

By the time he’d been officially discharged and left to the unnatural limbo of the waiting room, Neal still isn’t out of surgery. They’ve been removing the bullet from his side, just below his ribs, dealing with complications from his fall into the river. Peter can’t see the clock on the wall from this angle - he’s pretty sure it’s somewhere over his left shoulder, actually - and his watch got waterlogged when he’d pulled Neal out of the river. He doesn’t know how long he’s been here but it feels like far too long.

All around him, other families sit in the same state of terrible, gnawing anxiety. Doctors in scrub gowns appear every so often, walking up to one person or small group of people or another to deliver news, updates. Nobody comes to talk to Peter. 

Maybe it’s because there’s nothing to say, no news to bring. Maybe, though, he can’t help but think it might be because he exists in a fundamentally different category than they do. These are the daughters and brothers, spouses and grandparents of patients. The parents of patients, waiting to hear from the doctors of their daughters. Their sons. 

Peter, sitting there in the corner in his borrowed navy blue, New York City EMS branded sweatpants and Manhattan Presbyterian hooded sweatshirt, he isn’t really anything. Not in the eyes of the powers that be at Manhattan Pres, those in charge of deciding how often to pull someone away from surgery to update a frantic family. And yet he is. Frantic. He’s positively sick at the thought that Neal may never walk out of this building. 

It’s not the first time he’s felt this, like someone stuck an egg beater into his chest and turned it on, compressed his lungs down so hard he can’t pull a cubic inch of air into them. Fear like this can’t really be described as fear - the thought that Neal could die today is terror. Terror Peter is coming to know like the pastor of his father’s church, the one he’d met on only three occasions - the deaths of his grandmother, his uncle, his teenage cousin. 

There’s something almost funny in the thought that drifts into his mind then, still staring at that wall with its grotesquely neutral paint. It’s the odd musing that Peter never got to fear for Neal in any of the normal ways. 

Peter never got to stand on the porch with his pulse just a little fast and watch him teeter precariously down the sidewalk on his first two-wheel bicycle, or stand on that same porch and watch the first time he drove off in the car without someone in the passenger’s seat. He never got to feel the one-two skip-squeeze of his heart when Neal moved away for college, sitting up at night here or there wondering how he was doing, if he was adjusting okay, if he was lonely or happy or stressed. Peter didn’t get to start with skinned knees and fevers.

No, the kind of fear Peter gets to feel for Neal sucks all the air out of him as surely as a fan system stripping a room of its oxygen, it’s the same color as Neal’s blood staining his palms. It’s an explosion, a gunshot, a cemetery built plot by plot in his chest every time he has to face the possibility of walking through a devastated night and into a morning that will dawn on a world without Neal in it.

“Agent Burke?”

The voice slices through the haze of dread and pre-grief blurring even the peachy-beige wall, and Peter’s on his feet before he’s realized he’s moving at all. The doctor’s face is unreadable and her hands are loose at her sides and Peter’s heart is in his throat. He can’t speak around it. 

_Just tell me,_ he thinks. _Please, just tell me._

“Mr. Caffrey made it through surgery and is in a recovery room now.”

Just as quickly as he’d stood, Peter is back down in the chair. His knees have gone out from under him, and the rush of being able to breathe again is so heady he feels for a moment like he’s going to maybe pass out. He listens to the static hum of the doctor’s voice, filling him in on what has happened during Neal’s surgery. 

The specifics for the most part escape him, wash over him and leave behind only the core of it - it was dicey, but he pulled through. Now it’s a waiting game, to see if he’s going to wake up. It’s all hinged on that. Whether or not Neal will wake up. Which they’re not entirely sure he will, something about the water and the cold and his brain going without oxygen. Peter listens in a daze, and he follows the doctor to Neal’s room in the same daze, barely registering when the woman leaves.

Neal doesn’t sleep like that. 

That’s the first odd thought that wanders its way through Peter’s mind, standing frozen in the doorway, looking inside. When Neal sleeps, he sleeps on his side, curled in on himself, clutching something more often than not, a pillow or a throw blanket, up close to his chest. Now, Neal is flat on his back, arms loose and still at his sides. He looks like he could be sleeping, except for that. 

It’s disturbingly clear to Peter that someone else’s hands have laid him here, pulled that blanket up with the same kind but clinical efficiency of hospital employees the world over. People who cared for him in the detached way necessary to do their jobs, but didn’t know him at all. They know his blood type and what medications will keep him alive in what combinations, and Peter is grateful, but they don’t know how he sleeps, and it’s making his skin crawl to see.

“Hey, Neal,” Peter says. He eases himself into the chair next to the bed which is, contrary to what he’d believe from television, pretty comfortable. Neal doesn’t answer. He lays still and silent, not so much as a twitch to prove he’s still in there somewhere.

Peter’s eyes roam over his motionless form, looking for any indication that the Neal he knows is present, that there’s more left in him than the breath pushing his chest in a slight up and down. His hand, laying on top of the light green blanket he’s covered in, is pale and practically lifeless, and Peter can’t stand it. He reaches out and covers it with his own, hating how cold Neal is. 

This is the moment where he should be saying something. That’s what you do here, right? You look at someone who may not even be there anymore, and you find something to say to them that will help them come back. 

Nothing is coming to mind. Peter can’t think of anything to say, nothing that would mean anything, so he just sits there and waits, wholly inadequate to do anything about any of this. Maybe if he’d gotten to ease into it, if the danger he faced with Neal had started with something normal rather than pulling him away from burning planes, he would have some idea of what to do. 

This stuff doesn’t come in a manual, it turns out. He’s heard his friends with kids say it time and time again - he just never thought he’d be the one searching desperately for the how-to guide. 

Tentatively, no more sure of what he’s doing now than he was when he’d practically carried Neal home, high as a kite, having just stolen surveillance footage in the name of keeping him safe, Peter reaches out his other hand, letting his palm settle gently on Neal’s head. Slowly, half-awkwardly, he strokes his thumb over that place between Neal’s eyebrows where that little frown sits when he’s too distracted to bother putting on that bright smile. 

(Peter likes that expression of his better somehow, that little concentrating frown. It's real, which is more than can be said for ninety percent of the smiles Neal hands out like smoke-and-mirror candy.)

Neal’s always responded well to being touched, gravitating towards it, settling and focusing with a hand on his shoulder, his back. Peter learned it early on, has seen Elizabeth, Clinton, Diana, even Reese once, employ the same tactic - if you want Neal to pay attention, really hear what you’re saying, touch him. Maybe it'll work now, maybe it won't. For lack of anything else he can do, though, he'll have to hope and try.

“Wake up,” Peter says. His voice, pitched low and raspy with uncertainty, sounds louder than a shout in this quiet, quiet room. The only response is the steady beep of the heart monitor reporting Neal’s pulse, just this side of too slow. Peter’s thumb brushes over Neal’s smooth, expressionless forehead, hoping this is a case of still waters run deep, that the mind under it isn’t just as blank. “You’ve gotta wake up.”

It isn’t just Peter who keeps this watch. Diana shows up first, parks herself in a chair she dragged in from the hall, and starts doing paperwork. She talks to Peter like things are okay, with a determined set to her jaw that gives away just how not-okay she’s well aware things are, and what’s more, she talks to Neal too.

“The one guy who rabbited,” she says over the top of her folder, looking at Neal like he’s going to look back at her, “was picked up by PD trying to get to Jersey. Now, why you’d want to be wanted for kidnapping and assorted other felonies _and_ in New Jersey is beyond me, but.” Diana shrugs and looks down at her folder. 

She makes a few more comments, casual and easygoing, snorting about bureaucracy - “I wish we could make you do more of this stuff, just so you’d get exactly what it is we professionals go through,” - and generally acting like this is any day at the office. Diana swings her feet up onto Neal’s bed after a few minutes, her ankles crossed over the top of his blanket-covered shins. 

As she settles, she glances back at the unconscious man with a look that’s full of hope and anticipation, disguised to appear faux-casual. It’s like Diana had hoped that by touching him, she could bring him back, pull him out of wherever it is he’s gone to and back to them where he belongs. Just as quickly, though, she shakes her head and looks away, down to the pile of papers in her lap. 

There’s a pen in her bag that she digs out at some point, the cap absent mindedly tucked between her teeth as she fills out the upper right hand corner of some form. Diana works with a quiet efficiency Peter has always appreciated in her, never more so than right now. It all feels so normal. In the midst of all this, here’s Diana, doing paperwork with occasional commentary, directed at Peter and Neal both. And for a long time it stays that way, the scratch of the ballpoint the only sound aside from the drone of the heart monitor Peter’s gotten so used to it may as well not exist. 

“It’s not the same,” Diana says abruptly, after several minutes. Her pen has gone still in her hand, the papers lowered to splay over her thighs. She’s talking to Peter but she’s looking at Neal, and her expression of casual ease has gone completely from her face. 

“What’s not the same?” Peter asks, because from where he’s standing - sitting, whatever - the answer is ‘everything’. Everything isn’t the same, and it might not ever be again, depending on whether or not Neal opens his eyes again. Depending on what happens after, if he does. 

The pen takes a slow, wide circle in the air, indicating something general and impossible to specify. Diana shrugs with one shoulder, the hand holding the pen dropping down into her lap. 

“He’s not talking back,” she says. “He always talks back, always gives as good as he gets. I keep leaving him openings, like I think he’s going to take them and answer me. And he’s not answering. It’s just not the same.”

Peter wants to say something. He wants to find something useful or comforting to tell her, to stand tall and sure and confident. Team lead, senior agent in charge, he’s supposed to be the one with all the answers, right? He doesn’t have any. Peter has no answers and no reassurances, all he has is his own hope, desperate and scared in his chest, and there isn’t enough to scrape together to give any of it to her. 

“He’s going to wake up,” Peter says, because even though there isn’t enough to go around, he can fake it with the best of them, and that’s the next best thing. “Neal’s going to wake up and he’s going to be fine.”

There’s a long pause where they both sit there and look at that still face, maybe because they think this is the moment when Neal and his flair for cinematic timing will blink wide blue eyes open right on cue, and maybe because they can’t stand to look at each other and see the other wondering as much as they are. Wondering if it’s true.

Some hour later, all her paperwork stacked and tucked into a neat, bland folder, Diana puts her hand on Peter’s shoulder as she walks past him. She’s headed out the door, and she doesn’t say anything, doesn’t say goodbye, just squeezes his shoulder once, hard, and leaves. The sliding door of Neal’s hospital room swishes quietly shut behind her and Peter doesn’t move. Can’t move.

Elizabeth is on her way. Peter called her before Diana arrived from booking to finish her paperwork at the hospital while Clinton sorted things out at the office, needing to hear his wife’s voice in the heavy silence of Neal’s room. He told her what happened in stops and starts, and the fear he hears in her voice doesn’t do anything to reduce his. What does reduce it, though, is when she tells him that she’s coming right away, that the issue she’s taking care of up in Saratoga Springs is almost sorted out and then she’ll be right there. 

Peter repeats it to himself over and over in the space left behind when Diana leaves. _She’s on her way. Elle is on her way. Elle is coming, she’s on her way._

She’s still an hour and a half out, sending him a text from a gas station to let him know she’ll be there soon, when Clinton Jones walks in. Peter’s relieved to see him, and in the name of that relief, manages to muster up something of a smile. Clinton doesn’t really notice. He’s stopped just inside the door the same way Peter had been, when he first walked into this room. The expression on his face is something like shock, and it occurs to Peter that this is the first time he’s seen Neal since all the chaos. 

“He’s going to wake up,” Peter says, just like he’d told Diana earlier. It feels just as inadequate now as it had then, but he can’t think of anything else to say.

“Yeah,” Clinton says after a long moment, body lurching into motion at the same time his voice does. He walks over and assumes the chair Diana left behind in the room, pulling it closer to the bed and sitting down. That thrown-off, ice water down your neck expression is still on his face, and Peter can’t blame him. 

Seeing Neal like this, someone they know as a bright, whirlwind of a young man who bounces off the walls more often than not, especially when he gets on a roll… it hurts. Every time Peter glances at him it’s like jabbing fingers into a deep, violent bruise. 

Unlike Diana, Clinton didn’t bring paperwork. Instead, he brings with him news. He fills Peter in on how things went down in booking, the process he’d overseen where those arrested were taken in officially. They were to be charged with the crimes involved in the original case, now with the possibility of kidnapping, assault with a deadly weapon, grievous bodily harm, use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, and attempted murder stacked on top, depending on which of the men was in question. That’s letting them off lightly, if Peter were to be consulted. 

After his summary of how things have shaken out at the office, Clinton settles in the chair, lifting up something Peter hadn’t noticed when he first walked in. It’s a book, the size of the trashy romance novels and murder mysteries you find in the checkout aisle at the grocery store or the convenience mart at the airport. Peering at the cover, Peter makes out the title and the author. It’s one of the legal thrillers Clinton’s always been not-so-secretly fond of.

There’s a soft rustle as Clinton finds his place and picks back up reading the novel, and Peter tips his head back against the back of his chair. He feels very, very tired all of a sudden, the wave of exhaustion slamming into his chest like the cold of the river had. Maybe he’d be able to sleep, if it weren’t for that same fear still churning in his gut. Peter can’t help but feel that if he goes to sleep, Neal will be gone when he wakes up. 

So Peter doesn’t sleep. He keeps his eyes closed, though, listening to the heart monitor and the faint, barely discernible sound of Clinton turning pages. He listens to this so intently it becomes almost meditative, the background noise of something that isn’t sleep but isn’t quite fully awake either. By the time he realizes that something about the sound has changed, Peter couldn’t pinpoint when it started, the new bit.

Clinton is talking. Or, Peter thinks, frowning with his eyes still closed, concentrating, not talking. That’s the wrong cadence for talking. As he focuses harder, Peter’s exhausted, frazzled brain parses the words. They don’t make any sense, not at first.

“The official name of the gathering was a discovery conference,” Clinton is saying, low and quiet, “and it was typically a brief lawyers’ get-together in front of the judge to discuss the initial stages of the lawsuit. No record was kept, just informal notes taken by a clerk.”

Forcing his eyes open, Peter peers at him curiously, and the instant he gets a look at his colleagues, his friends, he understands what’s going on.

“Often, and especially in the courtroom of Harry Seawright,” Clinton reads out of the book, held open with one hand, while the other is curled around Neal’s forearm, still and bare on top of the blanket he’s covered in, “the judge himself begged off and sent a magistrate to pinch-hit.”

Reading. Clinton is reading out loud from his book, voice as steady as it is soft, the same as the grip he has on Neal. The realization makes Peter’s breath catch, and he presses a hand over his mouth, stifling any sound that may have emerged before it could make its way out. He looks at Neal, who hasn’t responded at all, the R2D2 beeping of the monitor at the same even pace, and listens to the words, to Clinton’s voice reading them. 

It’s the pointlessness of it that really gets to him, Peter thinks, reaches in and twists, in the same and yet a different way than the fear does. There’s no reason for this. Clinton Jones might just be the smartest person Peter’s ever met, and he knows there’s nothing they can do, that the odds that sitting here and reading out loud isn’t going to solve or even help anything, but he’s doing it anyway. Because that’s the kind of thing you do, when that’s all that’s left you _can_ do, and doing nothing isn’t an option. You do pointless things, things of no concrete value, because you care, and you have to do _something._

Peter doesn’t know how many pages Clinton gets through before he gets a phone call he has to step out and answer, and he certainly doesn’t know any more about the plot of the book now than he did before, but something feels different. Clinton’s book and Diana’s one-sided banter, they’ve left the room feeling different. Neal is still dead to the world - Peter’s lungs seize and his throat almost closes when he thinks the words, shaking his head once, hard to dispel them.

Neal is still unconscious. He’s still unconscious, and nothing shows any sign of changing just yet, but the silence feels lighter now. Maybe the weight of it is the same, Peter muses, just shared. 

The contents of the phone call send Clinton back to the office, and it’s not fifteen minutes later that Elizabeth shows up. She arrives with a hug and a kiss and hair that smells like cold wind, and has a lot of questions. Some of them, Peter can answer - he was shot, hypothermia, oxygen deprivation, he hasn’t woke up, no not even once - and some of them he can’t - they don’t know what’s wrong, they won’t tell me, I don’t know, I don’t know, the doctors don’t know. 

Elizabeth walks to the top of the bed as Peter lowers himself down into the chair he’s grown so used to, and stops next to Neal’s shoulder. She reaches out and brushes at his hair, fingers combing it away from his forehead, back into something resembling the tidy style Neal keeps it in, though it doesn’t hold, product washed out by the river. Once his hair has been fixed to her satisfaction, Elizabeth stoops over him and presses a kiss to his forehead, the same place Peter had laid his hand, when he’d first been allowed in. 

“He’s going to wake up.” It’s the third person Peter has said this to, today, and he wonders what it means that the strength he says it with lowers with each person. When he says it to Elizabeth, it sounds more like a plea than an assertion. He’s asking, not telling, and he couldn’t for the life of him say who it is he’s asking. 

Foregoing the chair that had been occupied by first Diana and then Clinton, Elizabeth perches herself on the edge of Neal’s bed. Neither of his teammates had looked at him much, but Elizabeth, she looks straight at him. Her eyes flick away from Neal’s face and towards Peter’s and he gets the distinct feeling that she knows how scared he is. She’s looking right through him, and she can see it. 

“Elle, he has to wake up,” says Peter, and this time he doesn’t even pretend to be certain. Why bother? She’s already seen it. “They said- The doctors said that the water was so cold it helped to… To be honest I didn’t really understand it, but they said he has a chance. A good chance. They said it’s likely he’ll wake up without deficits.”

“He’d better.” There’s a hardness in Elizabeth’s voice, one Peter has heard before, when she gets her mind set on something, determined and stubborn. 

One of her hands has settled over Neal’s chest, palm lifted slightly by the gentle rise and fall of his breathing. As Peter watches, she taps lightly, fingers lifting and settling, wrinkling the over-starched hospital fabric. Elizabeth has looked back away from Peter, back towards Neal, and he can see in her face everything that’s been battling back and forth in his own chest. She’s scared beyond belief, but fiercely determined. They exist together in her expression, with an open ease Peter has always admired and been mystified by. Elizabeth feels what she feels right out in the open, direct and honest. 

“Neal had better come back to us,” she says firmly, with another quick look over her shoulder. “Our boy had better come back to us, Peter. He knows I’ll never forgive him if he doesn’t, and he’s not gonna risk that. So he’s going to wake up. He doesn’t have a choice.”

Peter closes his eyes tight and breathes deeply. If he can’t see the fear in her face, then the conviction in her voice might be enough to convince him to believe it. It’s true enough that Neal would sooner die than risk letting Elizabeth down.

“I tried to call Mozzie,” he says after a while. His shoulders have started to ache, the tension he’s been holding for so long beginning to take its toll on him physically. “Didn’t get an answer. He must have gone dark for one reason or another, he does that sometimes, and I’ve only got the one number for him. I thought he should know, but I just. Couldn’t reach him.”

“We can try again later,” Elizabeth suggests, and Peter nods. “I’ll give him a call in a bit.”

“Thanks, hon.”

They lapse into silence, then, the two of them and the unconscious form between them. Peter is glad she’s here with him now, that throughout the whole ordeal he’s hardly been left alone in here. That he’s been able to have this tangible proof that if the tightrope Neal lives his life on snaps, and he falls, it won’t just be Peter there to see it.

Time drags on. The clock on the wall ticks audibly, in the room that’s gone quiet enough to hear it beside the droning sound of the monitor, tapping against Peter’s skull like an audible headache.

Neal still hasn’t woken up and Peter can tell the doctors are starting to get squirrely. They’re popping in more often, and stepping out more quickly when they do, two at a time, once even three. A woman Peter doesn’t recognize at all comes the most recent time, going through the same checks the others did, saying nothing the entire time. When Peter asks, she gives him the same bland smile as the two before her had, and tells him they’ll let him know if they have news.

That’s when Peter decides to do something a little drastic. 

“Can you keep an eye on him?” he asks Elizabeth, who nods without looking up. She’s got her hand back on Neal’s head, fingers pulling lightly through his hair.

“I’ve got him,” she says, soft and steel, and if it had been anyone else, Peter never would’ve left that room. As it stands, he gets up, sliding the door closed behind him. 

The hallway lights are brighter than the ones in Neal’s room, and maybe twenty feet away, there’s a group of harried medical professionals rounding a corner. Nurses duck in and out of patient rooms. An orderly pushes a metal cart down the hall, checking room numbers, then stopping outside the desired one. All around Peter, life is going on, while for him it’s ground to a stand-still. 

The cell phone in Peter’s hand feels heavier by the second. He’s got a number pulled up already, one he only has in case of emergencies - and an emergency this certainly is. Still, he’s reluctant to make the call. His thumb hovers over the glowing green icon on the screen and he can’t quite bring himself to press it. 

James Bennett is not a man Peter likes, and is certainly not a man Peter trusts. He still remembers, vivid as anything, when he’d called Neal to deliver the news, that Sam wasn’t Sam at all, and then driven frantically over to June’s house. He remembers bursting in that door, every instinct in him screaming to get between Neal and James. And then there had been that split second moment, when James opened his jacket, and Peter had reached for his gun. Instinct had taken over, and all he’d thought to do was protect Neal from an imminent threat.

Things haven’t changed much since then. Peter has backed off, for Neal’s sake, because this is his father and Neal deserves the opportunity to cultivate that relationship he’s wanted for so long. But even after that odd family dinner, where James had thanked Peter and Elizabeth for looking after Neal in much the same tone a returning parent thanks a babysitter, he couldn’t shake the feeling that this man wasn’t to be trusted. Not in general, and certainly not with Neal specifically. 

Right now, though, Peter is out of options. It’s been too long, and Neal still hasn’t woken up, and giving him a reason to come back is more important than whatever possibly accurate, possibly jealousy or insecurity motivated feelings Peter has about James. Maybe Neal will wake up if it’s the father whose absence has left a never-healed wound in his life asking him to.

“Burke?” James sounds confused and suspicious when he answers the phone.

Before he can talk himself out of it, or James can decide to hang up before hearing him out, Peter spills the entire story. He talks, fast and urgent, through what happened, the kidnapping, the docks, the gun and the river. Neal, gone somewhere Peter can’t pull him back from.

“If he hears you,” he says, finally reaching the conclusion, the point of why he’d called to begin with, “he might wake up. He’s spent a long time waiting for you, looking for you, and I think if you asked him to, he might…”

“Do you know how risky that would be?”

That is not the reaction Peter had been expecting, and it shows in his response, a shocked, “Excuse me?”

“Do you know how much hot water I could be in if I’m found, Burke? And you’re asking me to risk my safety to- to ask Neal to wake up, just in case he might listen to me? I’m not a doctor. There’s nothing I can do to help him, and I don’t know where you’re getting the idea that there is.”

“Neal needs you! He needs to hear you tell him to come back. You’re his father and he _needs_ you, I don’t get what’s so hard to understand about that.” Peter can’t believe what he was hearing. He’d wanted to believe that James was invested, that he was here for the long haul, back and committed to being a parent again. Despite his misgivings, his hesitation, he’d wanted to believe that, because that’s what Neal deserves. 

Then again, he supposes, the world has never exactly been on top of giving Neal what it is he deserves, in any sense. James is just the latest in a long line.

“I can’t jeopardize everything for the sake of some sentimental nonsense that won’t even work. He’s got doctors, I can’t help him. Besides, you’re the father he wants anyway, kid went and told me as much to my face. You really think it’ll work, Agent, _you_ wake him up.”

The line goes dead. 

For a long, still moment, Peter keeps holding the phone up to his ear. He can’t process what’s just happened, his mind is reeling, and there’s no way James just hung up on him. There’s no way, with his son unconscious in the hospital, possibly never to wake up, that James just went and _hung up_ on him. 

Except he very much did. James very much did just hang up on Peter, and that’s not even _touching_ the rest of what he’d said - ‘you’re the father he wants anyway, kid went and told me as much to my face’, what does that _mean?_ And now Peter has to go back in that room with the knowledge that James isn’t coming, _won’t_ come to the hospital, won’t shoulder even a little of the weight of the question of whether or not Neal is ever going to wake up.

The room feels colder, somehow, when he walks back into it. Elizabeth is sitting in the chair Diana had dragged in now, hand still on Neal’s chest. She’s looking up at the monitor, and if she can make heads or tails of the numbers and lines displayed on it beyond ‘he’s still alive’, it’s more than Peter can get out of it.

“He’s not coming,” Peter says. He pulls his own chair up towards the head of the bed until he’s directly across from Elizabeth, sitting down heavily. It feels like someone’s tied weights to his spine, poured concrete down it and let it set.

“Who isn’t coming?” Despite the question, the look on Elizabeth’s face gives Peter the distinct impression she already knows who it is he called. She just needs to hear it out loud to understand it, to fully realize it.

“James. I called James, and I asked him to come to the hospital I thought… I thought if Neal heard him he might…” Shaking his head, Peter lets the thought drift off into nothing. It probably wouldn’t have worked anyway, Neal’s long lost father no more persuasive than Peter had been, than Elizabeth, and Diana, and Clinton had been. “Anyway. He won’t come.”

Elizabeth doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t really have to. Her face says enough. Her expression has gone hard and angry, though it stops there, doesn’t trickle down into the hand she has on Neal’s shoulder, thumb methodically moving in long strokes over his collarbone. It compartmentalizes - her face, as she thinks about James, is furious, but her hand on Neal is kind, gentle. 

“He said something, right at the end.” For the life of him, Peter couldn’t say what is compelling him to tell her, just that all of a sudden it’s coming out, and he doesn’t stop it. “James did. Said,” his voice changes slightly, indicating the quote, “‘You’re the father he wants anyway, kid went and told me as much to my face.’ I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.”

“What you do with that is you step up.” Elizabeth says it like it’s that easy, like it’s that simple. “You step up like you’ve been stepping up for years. You’ve been taking care of him longer than James did, at this point. You know how, you’ve been doing it for years.”

“Yeah,” Peter agrees softly. “Yeah, I guess I have.”

“We’ll figure it out as we go.” When he glances over at her, Elizabeth shrugs one shoulder. “You’re not doing it alone, either, hon.”

At the moment Neal’s breathing changes, Elizabeth has stepped out. She’s gone into the hallway to try again to get ahold of Mozzie, and that’s when Peter notices it. The sound of his breathing shudders and skips, and when Peter’s attention snaps to his face, Neal’s eyes are open. They’re glassy and unfocused, and his entire body is trembling, but he’s awake.

“Neal,” Peter says, standing so fast he knocks the chair back a couple of inches. “Neal, look at me. Can you hear me?” With uncertain, nervous hands, Peter takes ahold of his face. Neal’s jaw is cold under his palms, a tremor running through him, and Peter asks again, “I need you to answer me, buddy, can you hear me?”

Blinking hard, Neal peers up at him, and moment by moment, his expression clears. “Peter,” he says, voice hoarse and barely audible.

“Yeah.” Smiling, Peter does his best to ignore the crack in his own voice, the tightness in his throat. “It’s me.”

“Thought I-” Closing his eyes hard and opening them again, Neal clears his throat and tries again. He sounds hazy, the same meandering, drifting quality to his voice Peter can remember from having seen him on pain medication before. “Thought I told you not to come.”

The relief that floods Peter nearly takes him to his knees. Neal is awake. He’s awake, and he recognizes Peter, and remembers things, down to what he’d screamed across the phone what feels like days ago but had really only been early that morning. 

“Yeah, well,” he says, still smiling, tapping Neal’s cheek lightly, “you’re not the one who gives the orders around here, are you.”

Though he knows he should probably be calling the doctor right now, Peter opts instead to give Neal a few more moments to get his bearings. He leans back a little, straightening the blanket and making sure the IV hasn’t been disturbed, giving Neal as much space as he’s comfortable giving at the moment.

That’s when Neal, looking around the room with wide, still somewhat glazed eyes, asks the question Peter’s been dreading.

“Where is, uh,” he says, hazy and slow. “Did you call, um, where is…”

No matter how difficult it had been for Peter to have James refuse to come and then hang up on him, that’s nothing compared to how difficult it’s going to be to have to tell Neal that’s what happened when he called. 

“I called James,” Peter tells him, awkward and stilting. “I’m sorry, Neal, I don’t know how to put this, but-”

“James?” Hand to god, Neal laughs. He actually _laughs,_ an odd, drugged giggle. “I was asking about, I was lookin’ for Elizabeth.” Something in Peter’s chest snaps and loosens, though before he can process this information, Neal says, through another laugh, “You thought I was looking for my _dad,_ Peter?”

“I mean.” Shrugging, Peter wishes that Elizabeth _would_ show back up right about now, before he actually has to have the rest of that conversation, explain to a Neal high on pain medication that James refused to show up.

Neal laughs again, head lolling from side to side in an amused shake. “No, Peter, no, I gave…” One hand lifts slightly from the blanket, waving in the air then dropping back down. “Gave up on that _years_ ago.”

It’s not as reassuring as pain medication Neal might think it’s supposed to be, and Peter is at a loss for words. 

“Besides,” Neal says, looking right at Peter now with this disarmed, open expression that leaves Peter feeling like he shouldn’t be letting him say anything, not when he doesn’t really seem to be in control of what he’s saying. “I got a better one now anyway.”

If Peter didn’t know what to say before, any idea he may have come up with has now been completely stripped from his mind. He stands there next to the hospital bed, looking down at Neal, who grins up at him like he hasn’t just said something completely flooring. Before he can manage to scrape together a single sentence out of his exhausted, shocked brain, the door slides open and Elizabeth returns.

“So Mozzie is- Neal!” She walks over quickly, abandoning her line of thought when she notices him looking at her. “Neal, sweetie, you’re awake!”

“See,” Peter manages, gesturing to his wife, “there she is. She was just right outside.”

More competent by far than he can seem to figure out how to be in this situation, Elizabeth looks around, spotting the call button to alert the nurse’s station. She presses it as she talks to Neal, telling him that Mozzie is on his way and would be here soon, that everything is going to be fine, that she and Peter aren’t going anywhere.

“We’re right here,” she’s saying, even as the team of doctors arrive and crowd into the hospital room. “Everything’s gonna be okay, we’re right here.”

 _Yeah,_ Peter thinks, shuffled back away from the bed so the doctors can run their checks, verify that Neal really is going to be okay. James’s absence barely leaves a hole in that room, so suddenly full of people and noise. _We’re right here._

**Author's Note:**

> the quoted section from when clinton is reading is from john grisham's 'the litigators', page 183 in the copy i just pulled off my shelf.


End file.
